News and analysis of critical issues in homeland security

July 9, 2012

To be honest, the following reports/articles/information strike me as interesting and worth sharing. Have I read them at this point? Nope. Can I recommend any summaries? Nope. Do I have lessons to draw from this collected wisdom? Nope.

Just hoping you find these as potentially interesting, informative, and enlightening as I hope they just may be…

A panel of “independent” experts has recently released a review of the underlying causes and effects of the Fukushima nuclear accident. The executive summary is 88 pages long. This is a serious report. I’m going to work my way through it and I would hazard a guess that it would be worth the time of many of you to do the same. As reporting describes it:

Last year’s nuclear crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant was a “profoundly man-made disaster,” the result of poor earthquake-safety planning and faulty post-tsunami communication, a report from an independent parliamentary panel said Thursday.

The sharp criticism of the Japanese government and the nuclear operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco) provided an alternative narrative to an earlier investigation by Tepco, whose in-house panel concluded that the disaster was unforeseeable, spurred by a “giant tsunami beyond our imagination.”

In contrast, the report released Thursday suggested that the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that triggered the tsunami may have caused critical damage that led to the series of meltdowns. It argued that the nuclear power plants should have been made more quake-proof, and blamed lax safety measures on what it called the country’s powerful and “collusive” decision-makers and on a conformist culture that allowed them to operate with little scrutiny.

The “strong winds” reporting has to do with UMass students’ efforts to document recovery in Western Massachusetts following last year’s tornadoes. The articles seem to be behind relatively new Boston Globe firewall, but I’m sure if you search hard enough you will find copies…

One year ago, students in a UMass investigative journalism class began looking into the aftermath of the tornadoes that devastated parts of Western Massachusetts last June 1. Today, their work appeared in The Boston Globe newspaper, its website and on Boston.com. The project is part of an ongoing partnership between The Globe and the UMass Journalism program. Students owe a special thanks to The Globe’s Scott Allen and Matt Carroll, who played large roles in guiding this project

Additionally, students produced several written sidebars and several video narratives. All the content can be found here: